The Flashback Saga
Posted by Kevin Hazard, October 17th, 2006
About a year (and a few hundred thousand dollars) ago, we came up with the idea of creating a reliable, functional, and customer-friendly auto-versioning software application that we would give to all of Site5’s shared hosting customers to use in their sites’ content management. We had everything fired up and ready to roll in December 2005, but we ran into a bit of a problem as we began to roll the software out to all of our servers: the SVN guts of the system did not work the way we needed them to work. David Felstead, one of Site5’s Senior Software Engineers described the bottleneck in his blog about the insufficiency of SVN, and even after replacing SVN with some wicked pure-Ruby algorithms, it seemed like every time we were ready to release the software, something else would go wrong (yeah, that’s a shout out to Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives).
Flashback was always going to be ready “sometime next week,” and it was often pushed to the side as the Engineering team successfully released Synco (Site5’s infrastructure and internal management portal), Backstage (Site5’s home-grown, redesigned customer portal), Squire (in-house server monitoring and reporting system), and several operations-related projects to ensure quality service and support for all Site5 customers.
Over the past few weeks, Site5’s CTO, Adam Greenfield, was able to work with David and Scott Deming to iron out the last wrinkles in the Flashback system to ensure that it lives up to the initial vision we had for Flashback:
“Flashback is essentially a website time machine. We see this development as a new user’s dream come true: Changes you make to your site are saved and indexed on a backup server, and you can revert to any change in the life of your website at any time through a quick, intuitive interface. This technology creates an immediate backup of your site, so if you make a mistake or like your old design/content better, you can quickly “flash back” to your old version with the click of a button. This development is an example of an industry oversight; it is clearly a valuable tool, but the industry operates under the mentality of “good enough.” The “good enough” approach to accomplishing this goal is to maintain nightly backups of sites and encouraging users to backup old files before changing them so they can be uploaded to revert to them. On top of the labor-intensiveness of the “good enough” approach, you run the risk of not restoring small changes that could play a large role in your site, so the Flashback system seems like one of those “should have been done a long time ago” developments which will provide security and peace of mind for newbie web developers.”
Obviously, Apple agrees with us about this kind of system’s value (*cough* Time Machine *cough*), but that’s a story for the next installment. To get a more in-depth look at Flashback, check out www.whatisflashback.com.
And yes… Flashback is out… seriously this time…
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